The avrdude program was previously called avrprog. The name was changed to avoid confusion with the avrprog program that Atmel ships with AvrStudio.

avrdude is a program that is used to update or read the flash and EEPROM memories of Atmel AVR microcontrollers on FreeBSD Unix. It supports the Atmel serial programming protocol using the PC's parallel port and can upload either a raw binary file or an Intel Hex format file. It can also be used in an interactive mode to individually update EEPROM cells, fuse bits, and/or lock bits (if their access is supported by the Atmel serial programming protocol.) The main flash instruction memory of the AVR can also be programmed in interactive mode, however this is not very useful because one can only turn bits off. The only way to turn flash bits on is to erase the entire memory (using avrdude's -e option).

avrdude is part of the FreeBSD ports system. To install it, simply do the following:

# cd /usr/ports/devel/avrdude
# make install

Once installed, avrdude can program processors using the contents of the .hex file specified on the command line. In this example, the file main.hex is burned into the flash memory:

The -p 2313 option lets avrdude know that we are operating on an AT90S2313 chip. This option specifies the device id and is matched up with the device of the same id in avrdude's configuration file ( /usr/local/etc/avrdude.conf ). To list valid parts, specify the -v option. The -e option instructs avrdude to perform a chip-erase before programming; this is almost always necessary before programming the flash. The -m flash option indicates that we want to upload data into the flash memory, while -i main.hex specifies the name of the input file.

The EEPROM is uploaded in the same way, the only difference is that you would use -m eeprom instead of -m flash.